Adobe kills Flash for mobile devices, HTML5 is the future

If Steve Jobs is still alive today, we’d probably expect an “I told you so” and a smirk from him after Adobe announced that they will halt development of the Flash Player for the mobile platform.

A lot of people were criticizing Jobs for not reaching an agreement with Adobe to deliver Flash support on the iOS platform before. Jobs said that Flash is just too unwieldy for mobile and it will affect the performance and user experience of the iOS. As a person who tried quite a number of Android devices, I agree that Flash performance is inconsistent on mobile devices that support it.

Well that argument is moot now as Adobe will now focus their investment into the development of HTML5 which they say is the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. Adobe will also be switching their work with Flash for mobile devices to instead enable Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. In short, the future of Flash is in PC web experiences, including gaming and premium video, as well as mobile apps.

The upcoming Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook will be the last version. However, Adobe will still continue to provide support and bug fixes for existing device configurations.

Jobs saw that Flash, historically a desktop PC technology, isn’t really a match for the scarce processing power of mobile devices, and insisted on excluding it from Apple’s mobile products despite the fact that most people saw that as a disadvantage when compared to Android-powered devices. That’s the entrepreneurial spirit, choosing risky long-term gains over certain short-term ones, and it’s one of the things that made Apple great.